New! The CEP is in the news! Research conducted by Aaron Sell at Griffith University in Australia and John Tooby and Leda Cosmides at UCSB have
identified the functional advantages that caused the specific appearance of the anger face
to evolve. Their findings appear in the current online edition of the journal Evolution and
Human Behavior. Click here to read the press release and for more information.

New! In a previous paper we provided a simple solution to explain the puzzling phenomenon of cooperation in anonymous, one-shot encounters. A recent paper in Evolution and Human Behavior challenges our conclusion. Interested in our thoughts on this new paper? Read further here.

For our previous research on how intergroup conflict decreases racial categorization and FAQ, see this:

Is it possible to prevent people from automatically categorizing others by race? Years of psychological research suggest that race is always encoded in the process of impression formation, but the idea that the mind would have evolved mechanisms to identify racial categories is implausible given that our hunter-gatherer ancestors rarely to never encountered people of different races. See Can race be erased?: Coalitional computation and social categorization by Robert Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(26), 15387-15392. Click here for FAQ and more

For other recent CEP research on the psychology of coalitions and other kinds of group cooperation, see the following:

Humans cooperate in groups, but what is it about the human mind that makes this possible? To find out whether the mind has an evolved concept for identifying free riders-- individuals who take the benefits of group cooperation without contributing--see Delton, A. W., Cosmides, L., Guemo, M., Robertson, T. E., & Tooby, J. (2012). See The psychosemantics of free riding: Dissecting the architecture of a moral concept, by Delton, A. W., Cosmides, L., Guemo, M., Robertson, T. E., & Tooby, J. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2012. Advance online publication. (Supplemental)

When cooperation is organized as a public good even people who do not contribute can still access the benefits that cooperation creates. How does the structure of public goods affect moral reactions to people who merely opt out of cooperation – even if they do not take the benefits of cooperation?
To find out, see Merely opting out of a public good is moralized: An error management approach to cooperation. by Andrew Delton, Jason Nemirow, Theresa Robertson, Aldo Cimino, and Leda Cosmides in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (DOI: 10.1037/a0033495).

What explains our strong inclination to track the reputations of others and to punish their bad behavior? We report new empirical tests that suggest these features of human nature are adaptations for deriving benefits from small-scale interactions, not from inter-group competition. See What are punishment & reputation for? by Max Krasnow, Leda Cosmides, Eric Pedersen, & John Tooby in PLOS ONE, 2012. (UCSB Press Release; Supplemental)

What explains why humans are so generous, even in one-shot interactions? We show how the inherent uncertainty of social decision making, in combination with selection for direct reciprocity, leads to striking amounts of generosity. Our work reveals that natural selection creates motivation to be generous even in situations where generosity appears economically irrational. See The evolution of direct reciprocity under uncertainty can explain human generosity in one-shot encounters by Andrew W. Delton, Max M. Krasnow, Leda Cosmides & John Tooby in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011. Click here for more

Click here to see a Science letter by Delton, Krasnow, Cosmides, & Tooby on alternative approaches to the evolution of cooperation.

Just how specialized is the cheater detection mechanism? New research shows that it is activated only when the search for rule violations has the potential to reveal someone’s character—their propensity to cheat. It does not search for violations of social exchange rules when these are accidental, when they do not benefit the violator, or when the situation would make cheating difficult. See Adaptive specializations, social exchange, and the evolution of human intelligence by Cosmides, L., Barrett, C., & Tooby, J. in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107, 9007-9014, May 2010, . click here for more